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Personally, I think Apple is buying all of these chipsets NVidia can make for the moment...
Where I live, in Belgium, only 3 mobos are available with this chipset: The Asus, the Gigabyte, and now there's a new one from DFI: I'ts called the DFI LANPARTY Junior GF9400-T2RS .
So only 3 mobo's... it's what makes me think Apple is eating most of these chipsets right now.
Steve, leave one for me please if you will...
And take care of your health.

Has anyone seen another mobo?

Mr. Anand, any update since the test? Is there a revision 2 which solves the latency problem and so on?
I would like to buy one... I have a low power Pentium 4 631 'Cedar Mill' lying here, and I have everything except a mobo.
So I am kind of waiting to see the stated issues resolved in a certain mobo before buying one.
I was dissapointed by the G45's GPU, so I would prefer to buy an NVidia chipset...
I like to see NVidia being the leader in INtel-mainstream chipsets again!
Thumbs up for NVidia!

You say that you tried to keep every part of the system the same as much as possible. Why is it then that you choose a 140 Watt AMD processor and a 95 Watt Intel processor and say that the nvidia 9300/9400 is using less energy than the AMD chipsets?
You should have gone with something more the same like a 65 watt core 2 duo and a 65 watt athlon 64x2. That way you could be sure that you have honest results. And performance wise it is ofcourse obvious that the intel systems should perform better because of the ridiculously high end processor. Now there is no way of telling wich one is using less energy!
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What we could use is this in a 939/478 form factor with support for both DDR and DDR2 ram. There are a lot of Athlons and P4s out there still with motherboards that have died. With few choices on the market, an powerful and cheap integrated solution would be a great option for old systems. I would still build an HTPC out of my older X2s. Reply

I switched from a Pioneer Elite to Integra DHC-9.9 and to me it seems like the Pioneer sounds better. Pioneer during its speaker setup also setup EQ to compensate for room modes. I did not see Integra do that. Reply

I have never fully understood "PureVideo". It is my understanding that this is only supported by a handful few players, like the awfully buggy PowerDVD that simply won't run on my system (PowerDVD no longer support SCSI DVD-ROM). Reply

The performance for Ethernet CPU usage seems rather poor. In fact all of them are bad, as Intel should be in the region of single digit percentage shown in other website.

One interesting point i realize while reading, i hope to share with their reader.
Is that measuring the few percentage difference with low CPU resoource usage playing H.264 Full HD isn't very important at all... Why?

Because the difference between 15 - 25% , while 10% looks like a lot, the most important factor is POWER CONSUMPTION. While most people would think lower CPU usage and therefore lower power usage. In this article it turns out while Geforce has the lowest power consumption while using most CPU resources.

And how many people use their CPU for other heavy task while watching Full HD Movie?

I cant wait to see these being refreshed next summer, with 40nm, more die space because memory and most northbridge move to CPU, we should be able to put more then double the shader inside? Reply

So is this the article that was supposed to come out analyzing the 780G, 8200, and G45? You know, months.... and months.... and months ago? I'm glad you guys waited until nVidia released a competative product before releasing this article. Otherwise I would have bought a 780G motherboard months ago. Reply

I wish you guys wouldn't use the Sony BDU-X10S in your testing. I've owned this drive and it just sucks. Had problems on both Intel and NVIDIA chipsets.

As for the data transferring problem, I had the same problem recently on my Badaxe2 motherboard. I was moving my hard drive from my Geforce 8200 system to Intel G45 system but first needed to copy recordings to another hard drive so that I could format the hard drive. My desktop has a Badaxe2 is running Vista x64 and I too randomly experienced pauses when copying 500GB of data. Not sure if it is related but it might just be a Vista thing. Reply

In your next installment, can you please find the slowest usable CPU that plays Bluray smoothly and also test Speedstep with it? Using a quadcore is really overkill and kind of defeats the purpose of GPU DXVA. The 8200 w/ a 4850e cannot utilize CnQ to playback BR. I'd like to see whether a 9300 w/ E5200 or E7200 and Speedstep enabled can play BR smoothly.

Great to see the articles are up. A couple of quick questions and a comment.

Could you mention clearly what nvidia driver versions (both graphics and HDMI) you used for the tests?

Also, you seem to hint that 5.1 audio is an option with this newest driver set from nvidia. Is this indeed the case?

Also, to echo the comments of some others, it would be nice to see the blu ray playback numbers with cheaper cpus. I have seen the Athlon X2 BE (2.3 ghz) going for less than $40, and even a 3 ghz X2 for $75 or so, which would certainly make buying a cheap discrete graphics card a viable option cost-wise. Reply

Sorry for the confusion, absolutely none of the current chipsets (G45, 780G, GF8200, GF9300) support or will support bitstreaming TrueHD/DTS-HD MA. Next year we will see the first GPUs with actual support for this.

Isn't LPCM the best you can get anyway? Your Blu-ray decoder (Eg. PowerDVD, standalone Blu-ray player) decodes the audio stream (the best available) and sends that audio to your stereo via PCM. Some Blu-rays even have the LPCM stream raw on the disc. Why would you ever want/care about TrueHD/DTS-HD MA streaming when you are already getting perfect, lossless 7.1 audio to your speakers?

Hybrd power was one of the more compelling features of this chipset for HTPC use - I want my box sipping as little juice as possible untile game time. Unfortunately, all the reviews I've read so far and this Nvidia page:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/hybrid_sli_desktop.ht...">http://www.nvidia.com/object/hybrid_sli_desktop.ht...seem to indicate Hybrid Power is NOT a feature of the new chipset. I read the comment earlier about it being up to board manufacturers to implement but the page linked above seems to indicate the chipset itself lacks support. Can you guys please confirm? Reply

I've been holding off buying my new rig for 3 months just for this feature. I'm on 100% solar power and although I can still run my current rig that draws more power than a newer one will, any savings I can make are worthwhile (and give me more scope elsewhere).

All the reading I did months ago suggested this chipset would deliver Hybrid Power with Intel CPU. What's the official word on this? If, as the nvidia page linked suggests, this chipset does not deliver this, what's next? When do we get it? Reply

I'm not the brightest crayon on the box when it comes to tech but couldn't a company just solder on a decent chip and forget this whole IGP nonsense? Like take an Nvidia 9500 or 9600 chip and solder it right on to the board along with 128MB DDR RAM. You'd have you're reasonable gaming performance without suffering through the 9300 which looks to be nothing extraordinary. Couldn't they cool it with standard HSF?

There would be little room for it, unless you gave up say two slots. Chaintech did this years ago, cool motherboard, but ran very hot. Suffice to say, no one bothers with it anymore. You might as well just add the memory like side port but a seperate chipset and graphics chip? Only works well in laptops. Reply

You're not saving so much money over a discrete video card (you still need everything a video card have), and you can't "upgrade" (yes, you can add another video card and disable the onboard one, but you can't have your cake and eat it too).
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Sounds great. Now all we need is a follow-up of the HD 4xxx article as well as confirmation about whether or not these Nvidia issues are solved or will be solved shortly.

I'm really enjoying these HTPC based articles and hope you continue them. Now that the HDMI + 7.1 audio issue has finally been addressed I think it would be helpful to start looking into the software end of HTPCs, such as a Media Center software review (what programs that work well, include blu-ray playback, OTA support, network features, ect).

There are tempting systems such as the FuzeBox Media Server http://www.velocitymicro.com/wizard.php?iid=167">http://www.velocitymicro.com/wizard.php?iid=167 , which includes a seamless interface for Cablecard capture, blu-ray playback, multizone playback, expandable storage, network backups). The interface locks the user from exiting the media center interface, but provides a reliable, seamless, and feature rich experience that I have yet to experience with other media centers. The enthusiast looks at the price tag for such a machine and says, I can build that for half, except that the media center software isn't there. Help us enthusiast achieve that seamless experience without having to empty our pockets for pre-assembled box!

Wait my mistake, actually the german article mentions in the conclusion that they experienced bugginess with the hybrid-sli driver and sometimes games don't start or run really slow. Any comments from you guys at anandtech? Reply

Does nVidia intend to have this GPU on an AMD chipset at all, or have they given up competing there?

Can we expect this chipset to be used in Intel laptops (other than Apple), and will they still get the Centrino brand? If Intel insists on requiring their own chipsets for that brand, I'm afraid laptop manufacturers will not use it despite its obvious advantages.

Does something like hybrid-SLI work on this chipset, to get better performance from a 9400/9500/9600GT card?

From the Apple adverts it seems dynamic switching between the IGP and stand-alone GPU will be a reality in its laptops... is that the case also with the desktop version that you test today? I guess you'd have mentioned it if it were... Is it at least planned with future drivers or something? Reply

The Hybrid Power tech (switching between IGP and discrete GPU) should be available in this chipset; support for the feature still remains with the motherboard/notebook vendors, however. I'm still waiting for my first Windows notebook to feature hybrid power (which is also available with G45 chipsets... though why you'd want G45 over GF9300 is a tough question to answer; oh, right: Centrino 2!) You're right: Centrino as a brand is so powerful that NVIDIA can have the best solution in every way and still not see much uptake. We'll have to see how it goes.... Reply

It's funny... it seems that it's always the same, and Apple has to introduce something for people to get to know it...
Sony has been selling "hybrid-power" laptops for about 2 years now... (here is an old laptop running Intel's 965GM chipset with NVIDIA 8400M graphics and "the magic switch"), together with LED displays, SSD drives...
Their current offer gets you Centrino2+DDR3, BD, Raid-SSD, HybridStuff with Nvidia 9300M GS on Intel's GM45, Wide Gammut LED display, and still weights around 1.5Kg with 7.5-11h of autonomy...
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/feat1.html">http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/feat1.htmlReply

We will be updating the article shortly. It has been an all night meeting marathon with the motherboard suppliers and NVIDIA trying to get answers on the AHCI problems, memory performance, and other minor items we discovered. ASUS sent us a new BIOS that we will test in a couple of hours, the AHCI problems have diminished greatly after yet another clean install of Vista SP1 (still have some minor pauses during heavy drive load), and we feel safe enough in taking a detailed look at the motherboards in a couple of days.

That said, NVIDIA surprised us with this chipset, probably the best one (all around) on the market for HTPC setups and casual gaming performance now. That is not to take anything away from the AMD platforms, personally I am running a 8750 and GF8200 hooked up to a new 52" LCD, if the price was right, the 9350e is a really sweet processor that will greatly lower power requirements on the AMD side, as we will see next week. Hopefully, AMD will respond with multi-channel LPCM output in their IG chipset. If that is not important, the 780g/790GX is great. ;) Reply

Why would it be impossible to stream media? Most media streams are only a fraction of 100Mbit ethernet, even a full Blu-ray disc rarely hits 20+Mbit. The CPU usage charts for network traffic in this review are for full thoroughput tests, the NIC will never come close to pushing that much traffic when streaming media. Reply

That's my understanding, too. I was wondering what the delay was caused by, now my guess is that Apple wanted the exclusive for launch. Let's hope some new mini-ITX 2.0 Nano boards with this chipset will appear soon. Reply

This chipset in ULV form is the one being used in the new MacbookAir, so there is no reason why it couldn't be used in netbooks like the HP Mininote, as adequately demonstrated in the power consumption page of this preview. Reply